Grieving Pattern

In my head is a stormy haze.
I'll be round. I'll be loving you always

Seven days.

That's how long Bonnie lay in the little twin bed of the spare room her Grams apparently kept for her and stared blankly at the wall. She didn't speak. She barely slept a wink. She quickly found that her dreams were in chaos, previous memories of her old life rushing around her head. She kept seeing Elena's death every time she closed her eyes until it made sense that she was dead.

Until it made sense that she was here.

It took seven days of crying herself to sleep and waking up mere moments later, disturbed by the haunting images of her dreams, for Bonnie to accept that this was her life now. And she was a total stranger to it. Bonnie was starting to feel like she woke up to her own life and everything else that she had ever known was just a dream.

Bonnie was trapped between her emotions; feeling so many things at once, keeping track of her own thoughts was beginning to give her a migraine.

She felt devastated, blamed herself for all this madness, but mostly she was relieved. She finally felt free of all the agony from her old life, free from all the consequences that followed protecting Elena, free of all the little wars, free from death at every corner, free from the grief of her Grams being dead. And because of that relief, an avalanche of guilt fell over her and buried her deep in it.

She felt so lost and the only guidance she seemed to have that was meant to be remotely helpful had come from an ancient existence that talked to her in circles and didn't technically exist anymore. She was dropped into this hole and told that it was her new life to re-navigate, but she was never told how.

No one ever mapped it out for her, how being born into magic works, how one day you could wake up and have your entire knowledge of your own existence stripped from you, done over again, and given back to you in this chaos of things you couldn't begin to fathom.

But.

Always true to her nature, though, Bonnie had decided she would still do her best to figure it out. She would grieve, get all the sorrow out of her bones, wring her frame of all her tears and old memories that no longer were, and then she would face the situation at hand, head-on, with the same force that she always had when fighting for Elena.

It wasn't like Bonnie to get filled up with sorrow and utter defeat. She wasn't the type to just give up and let it go, live with her mess and just lie in it. Although she had no particular desire to, Bonnie had grown accustomed to fighting for her right to live and now was no different. She couldn't let herself be weighed down my grief. It wouldn't take her out of this situation or change the fact that her home was gone.

It hurt, but it was real.

And now she had to heal from it and move on.

The first on her mental list of knowledge she should gather about her new life was herself. She needed to know what exactly this Bonnie had been up to for the last eighteen years and was it anything remotely similar to what Bonnie had been tackling. Was she more powerful with this Bonnie's body or weaker? Was she an active witch or did keep magic use to a minimum?

If Elena was dead, why was she still somehow caught up with the Salvatore brothers?

She had so many questions, a mountain of them, and she felt mildly determined to get them all answered just as soon as she felt like coming out of the little hold she'd dug for herself.

She wasn't sure when she would be. Her Grams had been relatively easy to deal with concerning it. She seemed to catch on quickly that Bonnie wanted to be alone. She would bring Bonnie food that Bonnie wouldn't eat and come for the untouched trays at the end of the night before she turned in for bed. She would never talk to Bonnie, never bother her while she sobbed, never pried, just let her drain herself dry of all emotion.

Bonnie appreciated her Grams more than she could ever know.

The witch peeked over at her alarm clock, it reading 9:30 on the dot. She knew that her Grams would be up at any minute to gather her disregarded meals. Her Grams was always very proud of her strict routines. At 9:32, the knob to her bedroom door jiggled. Bonnie listened with her back to the door, but made no move to greet her when it opened.

"Bonnie," Damon's voice, thick and warm, broke through the air, causing Bonnie's eyes to widen at the sound. She hadn't expected it to be him. Or anyone else, for the matter. "It's time to get up."

Immediately agitated by his presence, Bonnie sat up and glared at him. She probably looked disgusting, mucus crusting to her skin from crying so much, hair matted from tossing in bed and never brushing her hair, eyes red and puffy from lack of sleep, but she didn't care. She hated that the first person she was expected to speak to was him.

"What do you want?" Bonnie snapped at him, voice rough and cracked.

Damon's face fell, but it was only for a moment. Had Bonnie not been staring so intently at him, she'd had have missed the utter disappointment that consumed his features just then, but she caught it just before he masked it over with a forced look of annoyance.

"Well, mostly, I just want my Bonnie back; the one who loved me back and didn't seem to stare at me hoping the sun melted my daylight ring off my finger and I'd burst into flames, but right now I'll settle for finding out what exactly happened to her in the first place."

Bonnie just stared at the vampire, slightly confused and extremely frustrated. She knew that in no world, no matter what the circumstances, she'd never love Damon Salvatore. But he stood here, staring back at her with such a hard, serious expression and a tense silence that she knew he was telling her the truth.

She recalls, very effortlessly, waking up next to Damon naked. She recalls the way Caroline had said that she put herself in Damon's bed routinely, the way Damon said she practically lived at the boardinghouse, the way Damon seemed to hang onto her every word, the way the first person she saw when she came from the woman's trance was Damon and his sea blue eyes staring at her with so much alarm.

She should have probably asked him about their life together in the past, asked him how it came to be that way, but she couldn't seem to fight off the thick layer of resentment and revulsion the elder Salvatore seems to bring out in her. So instead Bonnie says to him, "I could never love you back."

The tone of her voice was blank, but clipping. She could almost see her words cutting up his skin. This didn't seem to shake him. His fist clenched, but Bonnie was so remarkably aware of his every move at that moment, she saw it. He seemed to be prepared for this, for the way she was choosing to respond without real rationality.

"You may not, but my Bonnie does. And that's why I'm going to do everything in my power to bring her back and send you back wherever you came from." He says to her and sits at the end of her bed. "Now, tell me, word-for-word, what this woman you mentioned said to you."

"Where I came from doesn't exist anymore. I told you."

Bonnie's expression was still blank. She wasn't fazed in the slightest by his words. She knew that there was no way to reverse this. She was told that there was no going back, that there was nothing to go back to. She mostly just knew that Damon, no matter what world, was all talk and no bite. There was very little he could do to Bonnie that would benefit either of them.

"Then you can go wherever my Bonnie is and I'll take her back instead." Damon retorted, irritation evident in his voice.

Bonnie blinked at him. "You can't. She's dead."

She was only slightly ashamed to admit the sliver of pleasure she got from watching his resolve crack in front of her. That seemed to do it then, because moments later, Bonnie found herself pinned to the wall by his hands, eyes bloodshot and fangs out. But she didn't feel fear, something in her held her back from reacting, something knew that he was harmless to her.

"She's not." He says with certainty.

"Maybe you're right, but I don't know how to bring her back. This is way out of my magic jurisdiction." She says to him, shockingly calm. "Now put me down before I make you."

And he does.

He plants the tiny witch's feet to the floor gently and moves across the room in an instant to put distance between them, but he doesn't leave. Bonnie was a little surprised that he hadn't put up much more of a fight, hadn't pressed harder for information she didn't have like the Damon she knew would have. She had always known Damon to test her boundaries and push her to compulsory removal because of his colossal-sized ego.

Damon stares at her then and his eyes fill up with that same sadness Bonnie had noticed before, but now it seemed more personal.

"You're nothing like her, if you were wondering." Damon says to her softly, timidly. "You're cold and aggressive. The Bonnie I knew was warm, tender, and kind. She was forgiving and nonjudgmental. And she was powerful, more powerful than anyone ever could have known. She was in control, though. You don't seem to be any of those things. Don't worry yourself with loving back what doesn't love you. You might have her body now, but you're the furthest thing from her."

He doesn't move to leave, doesn't do anything but look at her and wait for a reaction. Bonnie sits down in her bed then, holds his gaze until she'd seated herself comfortably.

"I never claimed to be your Bonnie. I'll have you know that I am all of those things. But you don't know anything about the life I've had."

"That doesn't matter now." He argues. "Your old life is gone, you said. You're stuck here. Whatever has happened to you in the past technically doesn't even exist now."

"I remember my life as it was." She tells him sternly and that seems to be that. "I'm still her, you know. Your Bonnie and me, we're the same being. Our bodies, minds, and magic are one in the same. The lives we perceive as reality are just separate outcomes of different paths we could have taken. There are most likely millions of me with all different paths. I just don't understand why I got thrown into one where I still have to put up with you."

d.
Damon scowls and rolls his eyes, but doesn't respond to her snips at him. He'd realized early-on that whatever resentment she held for him wasn't actually for him, but for whatever version of him she'd encountered in her old life. It was all still so much to wrap his mind around. For the first time in ages, Damon had a headache. But he stayed, regardless of it, regardless of her snide remarks and bitter approach.

He wasn't going to leave her side again, not until he had answers, not until it made sense to him that the woman he loved was sitting right in front of him, but was gone forever.

"Whoever I was to you in your old life must have gotten you riled up quite a bit. What was he like?" Damon asks her curiously.

He tries his hardest not to note the way she rolls her eyes and scrunches up her nose at the thought of something she dislikes and he tries even harder not to notice that it's precisely something his Bonnie would do. But the speckle of hope crept into his cracking resolve and made him grin briefly, before he straightened his face, looked at his hands, and waited for her to answer.

"He was sickening. He was a homicidal moron. He was impulsive. He was reckless. He saw human beings as expendable, useless bits of fast food for him. He's the reason that my Grams was dead. He's the reason for everything that has happened to me and everyone I know in the past year and a half. It's all been a domino effect of his constant, incessant idiocy and missing moral compass."

Damon was quiet for a long time after she finished, letting the weight of her words settle into his mind. He listened to everything she had to say about him and there were things he knew could be applied to his past, but nothing of that nature since he stumbled on his Bonnie. He'd done nothing at all to hurt her or anyone she knew.

"Well," He starts. "I'm sorry that he treated you that way and caused you so much trouble, but you need to stop taking it out on me now. That wasn't me and I've never done anything to Bonnie that would get her or anyone she knows hurt. I don't feed on humans and I don't see their lives are expendable. I used to, but because of my Bonnie, I have a very healthy relationship with humans. I may have a slight temper, but my moral compass is very present."

He hadn't meant to come off so sarcastic or irritated with her, but he couldn't stand that he felt like she was using him as a target for all her negative emotions towards the situation. She was projecting and Damon knew that if it was still his Bonnie, he'd have been the same way. He would never let her treat him like this and talk to him the way she was.

The thought of having her there at that moment just leaves a bitter feeling in his chest.

He never thought he took her for granted, but if she could be back here right now with him; he'd make sure he never did.

His mind wanders to the night of her birthday, the night before it all went to hell. The two of them were curled around each other in bed, legs tangled and skin-again-skin. He remembers pressing kisses to her shoulder and hearing the tiniest chuckle out of her for it every time. He would have missed it without his special hearing.

But now he just missed her.

It made his hands shake. It made his throat burn for blood.

b.

Bonnie watched him withdraw with his final comment, watched as moment-after-moment his eyes became more and more sullen, as did his expression. She watched him intently as he took a deep breath and rubbed a hand over his face.

"What did you come here for?" Bonnie asks him.

He laughs then and shakes his head. "To see if Bonnie had come back somehow or if there was a way to bring her back. I came for her, but she's already gone. I guess it's time to accept that."

"Well what are you here for now then?" She asked, mildly irritated.

He shrugs. "It depends on what you plan to do from here. You don't have to stay here, you know. But we wouldn't turn our backs on you if you decided to."

Bonnie remained quiet then, because she hadn't planned on leaving. She, like him, had decided to accept this for what it was, accept her new life for what it was. And though the idea of being intimate with a Salvatore brother made her slightly cringe, she didn't want to be alone in this. She didn't want to go through something else alone.

"I want to stay with my Grams and I want to see Caroline."

The elder Salvatore stands to his feet with a nod and says, "Okay."

Here I am and I'll take my time
Here I am and I'll wait in line, always

(A|N) Sorry this took so impossibly long. I've got two jobs now so have just been writing bits and pieces when I had the time to, but I finally managed to finish. Hopefully the next chapter doesn't take nearly as long to write. Thank you for all the various forms of feedback. I love it! You guys are rad - foxes

(Disclaimer) Don't own it. CW and L. J. Smith do, though.